They can go under. The biggest problem with cell phone mergers is that once the merger takes place its forever, no new national level competitor can enter the market without an existing provider selling them bandwidth (which would pretty much be a lose/lose for said provider). If T mobile goes under and its spectrum is given to a new competitor it prevents us from falling all the way to three national providers forever.

'derivative' would include something like grabbing a copy of a chart or a table of figures published in the first paper. I don't write papers, so I'm not sure how much of a pain in the ass it would be to remake them (though I imagine a lot, since raw data usually isn't included), but I see this tactic uses very very frequently in secondary papers.

The coke bottle isn't covered under copyright, but trademark. So as long as its clear that your book is *about* Coca Cola (its always legal to use a trademark in a nominative fashion) and not *from* Coca Cola you have the legal right to publish it without their permission (this won't necessarily keep them from suing you of course, which is the real problem, not the laws).

As a specific example, although you can mostly copy the general size and shape of a pair of glasses, if the designer embeds a sculpture on the design or a designer specific pattern which serves no functional purpose (e.g, like oakley has an embedded O sculpted in their frame designs, or gucci which has a G), that design for that pair of glasses can be copyrighted.

IANAL and all, but I'm pretty sure those are trademarks and not copyright. That O is there so the consumer knows whats an Oakley and whats a (non counterfeit) knock off. Actually, I'm also pretty sure the coke bottle falls under trade dress. Trademark (and dress) have totally different rules than copyright.

Yeah uh, if this is anything like Call center forecasting they should probably pack up and go home. Most call centers I've worked for can't figure out that just after the holidays is the busiest time of the year. Or maybe they can and they just don't give a shit when the client pulls the contract because we were 30% under the staff we promised in the SLA come January 2nd.

Law of averages actually says you can expect to *lose* money from life insurance. But, as you pointed out life insurance isn't taxable, so they remove taxable profit by buying the policy, and get untaxable money back (on top of smoothing the lumps caused by employee training, though for walmart I expect turnover from quitting is higher than dying).

There's no reason for the artists to get paid for this, its not meant to be a service to provide new music, its a data availability service for music you already own. The money Apple is paying the record labels is basically extortion money.

That's true for paying the people who provide the iCloud service in this case (and if you want iCloud that's great). But this isn't a purchase service at all, you don't get music you don't already have out of it. So it might be de jure legit to pirate music then get it from iCloud*, but it's still de facto piracy, and has the same moral issues as going to pirate bay in the first place.

*If there was ever an argument that our IP laws need to be burned, pissed on, and rewritten from scratch that even the content providers would listen too this has to be it.